Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Part 1)

Editor's note: Jeet Heer conducted this roundtable on the occasion of Charles Hatfield’s book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. The participants include Jonathan Lethem (novelist and comic book writer), Glen Gold (novelist and comic art collector), Sarah Boxer (cartoonist and critic), Doug Harvey (art critic), Dan Nadel (co-editor of The Comics Journal website), and Robert Fiore (comics critic). The roundtable took place over email from February to April of this year.

This is the first of three parts. In this part, Kirby's work in general is discussed. Hatfield's book is examined in greater detail in parts two and three.

ONE: OPENING REMARKS

JEET HEER:

In a memorable 1995 exchange with Art Spiegelman, Gary Groth tried to make the case for the stature of Jack Kirby in the comics pantheon but acknowledged that the man who did so much to create the Marvel universe (as well as much else) could be hard to defend. “No one I’ve heard, not even Gil [Kane] has mitigated my skepticism about Kirby’s work,” Groth said. “Whereas Mike Barrier wrote a great book telling us why we should like Carl Barks’ work and I agreed entirely with his argument as to why Barks was an important creator, I’ve never really read anything that’s done that for me [with Kirby]…”

I think it’s fair to say that Charles Hatfield’s Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby is the book that meets the challenge that Groth thought had gone unanswered. While acknowledging everything that is problematic or even disreputable about Kirby’s work, Hatfield makes a compelling case that Kirby’s lifetime of “delirious graphiation” makes him central to the history of American comics.

The questions below are designed to pick up some of the central ideas of Hatfield’s book with an eye towards measuring the scope of Kirby’s achievement. I’ve often posed these questions in terms of dualities with a mind towards pointing out some of the tensions and contradictions in Kirby’s career, but also (I hope) as a way of spurring conversation about how Kirby in fact transcends some of the categories we might try and impose on him.

1. Kirby the cartoonist versus Kirby the visual artist. A key argument that Hatfield makes is that Kirby was a cartoonist, that almost all his drawings were done with narrative intent and need to be seen as storytelling rather than illustration. “The guiding idea behind Hand of Fire is that Kirby’s drawing is storytelling and that, conversely, his storytelling almost always used drawing, not scriptwriting, as its vehicle; the narrative and the drawing were coextensive, mutually animating and reinforcing, and inseparable. Kirby was a cartoonist (a word whose glory we have sacrificed in our haste to give respect to 'comics creators' and 'graphic novelists'). Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing.” (p. 18) As articulated by Hatfield, these ideas almost seem like common sense but isn’t there another way of seeing Kirby, as a visual artist first and foremost? Since Kirby’s death, there have been important museum exhibits of his work as well as an increasing market for his original art (and publications like the Jack Kirby Collector reprinting copies of his pre-inked pencil work). I myself on occasion find myself often gliding over the textures of Kirby’s art, enjoying them simply for their surface pleasure without a mind to their narrative content. This question is perhaps most pertinent to Doug Harvey but everyone should be free to weigh in: is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?

2. Kirby the collaborationist versus Kirby the auteur. For most of Kirby’s career, he worked within a comics production system based on a division of labor, collaborating with editors, writers, and inkers. The long-terms collaborations with Joe Simon and Stan Lee were the most famous examples of Kirby being a team player but even after he took an auteurist turn in 1970, he worked with inkers and, for better or worse, had to follow editorial dictates (as with DC cancelling the Fourth World books or Marvel trying to integrate the Eternals into their continuity). At the end of the book Hatfield reflects that, “The underlying problem for the critic has to do with, again, the need to locate Kirby’s authorial voice, if not autonomy, in the face of a market and a genre justified mainly in heteronomous terms. Simply put, it is hard to find Kirby the Auteur amongst all the commercial imperatives, the ‘failed’ projects, the unexpected hits, the feints and reversals, the very things that made his career arc in comics the looping, whirling, crazy dotted line that it was…” (page 252). Interestingly, the tension between individualism and group effort was a major thematic concern for Kirby (think of how the many groups he created like the Fantastic Four were riven by internal disputes, how they fought against each other as much as against the villains or think of how Kirby’s soldiers are often drawn as having uniform faces while his heroes are often grotesquely distinct, as with the Thing or the Hulk). I’m wondering, though, if collaboration should be seen as always a failure to live up to an auteurist ideal. Didn’t Kirby’s collaboration provide the necessary precondition for his productive career, just as the Thing found expression for his heroism in the context of the Fantastic Four?

3. Stan and Jack. Related to the question above, it might be worth revisiting the much disputed (and litigated) authorial battle between Stan Lee and Kirby. Hatfield offers a balanced account of their team efforts, arguing that Kirby “provided the conceptual material, the character designs, the unmistakable graphic style, the pace, and, eventually, the plotting and overall direction of the Marvel books with which he was linked [he] did not solely author any of the seminal Marvels of the period. His work was constrained and subliminally altered at the editorial level, with text that reshaped and at times redirected his plots. Furthermore, Lee’s vitalizing influence saturated Marvel and determined its editorial ethos. Kirby worked harder but, commercially, Lee made things happen.” (p. 95). Is this a fair assessment or is there more to be said about the troubled partnership between Lee and Kirby?

4. A superhero cartoonist or a master genre mixer? Perhaps the most conservative aspect of Hatfield’s account is his placing of Kirby within the framework of superhero comics. We’re given only a cursory account of the Simon and Kirby era (when his major genre was, surprisingly, romance comics but also included boys adventure, westerns, war comics, science fiction, horror and many others). The bulk of Hatfield’s book is taken up with Kirby’s work for Marvel in the 1960s and DC in the 1970s, when he re-invented and re-invigorated the superhero genre. Again, this approach seems like common sense but I’m wondering seeing Kirby through the prism of the superhero genre doesn’t diminish his originality as a genre mixer. Here’s another way of seeing Kirby: during the long apprenticeship of the Simon and Kirby years, he mastered the rules for the many genres he worked in and then in the 1960s he confidently started to splice these genres together to create a new meta-genre that was nominally superhero comics but actually had a much wider scope. Thus the Fantastic Four can be seen as a mixture of Challengers of the Unknown style exploration stories, Skymaster-style science fiction, monster comics (the Thing), romance and soap opera (the Reed-Sue-Submariner love triangle), space opera (Galactus and the Silver Surfer), a repurposing of older superhero and science fiction ideas (the stretching man in the tradition of Plastic Man, the human Torch, a character who can turn invisible), and many other genres. Hatfield touches on Kirby as a genre-mixer on page 22, but I’m wondering if more can’t be said about this. To put it another way, Hatfield describes the Fourth World books as “the climax of [Kirby’s] career in superheroes” (p. 143) but, thought these comics have superheroes in them, I’m not sure if they are superheroes or some new genre, a mutant cosmic fantasy.

These are some points to start off the discussion. Feel free to answer which ever ones strike your fancy and also to raise new issues and problems.

TWO: MODERNISM, COLLAGES AND THE WAR

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?“

Haven't gotten the Hand of Fire book yet, but that don't stop me from wanting to talk. I assume that everyone else knew about Andrei Molotiu's writings about this long before I did. The Dream Machine should be right below. This is one of the very few non-collage pieces of art Jack is known to have done for himself. I.e., there was no client. (His collages are a whole other topic we could jump on. Does Hatfield?) It's gigantic and I can't look at it enough. Neither could he -- it was over his desk for the last fifteen years of his life.

Now, I'm not an art scholar, so please excuse my flailing. Is this abstract? Or representational? I feel like all of the small parts of this could be constructed in some 3D sculpture. They are pistons and turbines and valves and switches. But when you add them up, they become shapes and ideas rather than objects. That face on the far right? The white part, like the front quarters of an insect? Is there a narrative here? I feel like there's an implied narrative (i.e. the machine probably hums to life and one part influences another, a narrative of something functioning) but not an overt one. If I look at it I might assign meaning and movement to it -- it's God's iPod -- but does that mean I'm bringing storyline to the party? Because there are other times where it's a just visual feast, as abstract as you want to get. There was no commercial intent to this piece.

Exhibit #2. This is currently my favorite Kirby cover from the Silver Age, and it couldn't be more different than The Dream Machine in its intent. Once you get beyond the positioning of the characters, how the eye follows in circles and jumps around the page, the expert direction of our attention, just try to unpack all the levels of observation and TIME going on here. An enemy hand is pushing a button while Fury, alarmed, draws his pistol. There's an element of depth of field -- I can't remember the critical term -- it's what von Sternberg was obsessed with, the space between his camera and Dietrich's face, which he filled with flats and scrim to indicate distance. Unknown hand in foreground pushing a button on a machine observing (and x-raying -- another level of space) an image of Nick Fury, who is reacting while, in the background a Hydra agent recoils because...well, because he's evil, I suppose. It's not a busy image, or overloaded with places we can look, but it tells such a winding narrative in a single panel that it makes my head spin. This is about getting you to buy the comic book -- it's very much about commercial intent.

And #3:

My hunch is that this is about as close to pure Kirby storytelling as you'll see from his peak period. I find it literally impossible to make this abstract. It was drawn, however, for people who had already bought the comic. It was about giving them their money's worth, and for Jack that meant in this case two guys beating the stuffings out of each other in such a way that the reader is drawn into their bodies.

I'll have more as I think about it or as you do...
GLEN DAVID GOLD:

Also I truly don't know what the state of Kirby scholarship is and I don't want to restate the obvious if everyone is already talking about this. But:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] In a memorable 1995 exchange with Art Spiegelman, Gary Groth tried to make the case for the stature of Jack Kirby in the comics pantheon but acknowledged that the man who did so much to create the Marvel universe (as well as much else) could be hard to defend. "No one I’ve heard, not even Gil [Kane] has mitigated my skepticism about Kirby’s work," Groth said. "Whereas Mike Barrier wrote a great book telling us why we should like Carl Barks’ work and I agreed entirely with his argument as to why Barks was an important creator, I’ve never really read anything that’s done that for me [with Kirby]…"

In that discussion, Spiegelman also said, "I suppose there's something about Kirby's sensibility, the optimism of it, that just puts me off. There's an unpleasant exuberance, like a teenager chattering so excitedly he keeps spritzing you with his saliva... I wouldn't even use the word 'respect' for Kirby, because I sort of like [his work], but I don't really respect it... I don't study his work."

Which is too bad, since Jack Kirby is the only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis. And he didn't do it from a distance -- he killed Nazis using the same hands that later drew Thor, the Aryan God of Thunder, hammering Mangog (old testament villain name, more or less) in the snout. Kirby shot and stabbed Nazis for about six months in 1943 and 1944, and I would argue that experience didn't just change his life but shaped his work from that moment forward, in that an underlying PTSD worldview took him places he wouldn't have gone otherwise. For instance: Kirby deepened the emotional realm of the Marvel Universe by the re-introduction of Captain America in Avengers #4. There has been plenty of talk of Lee and Kirby developing "Heroes with Problems" in the 1960s, but look at what they did first. The FF (they bicker a little), Thor (his girl loves him, but not his human alter ego, a la Superman -- not much of a revelation there), Ant Man (come on!), the Hulk (strictly a monster book when Kirby was handling it). The heroes' problems were pretty minor.

Avengers #4, with the introduction of Captain America, now had a hero with a truly nuanced, complex unsolvable problem: Post traumatic stress disorder. Cap responded from his thaw by freaking out, flashing back, displaying hypervigilence, remorse, guilt, nightmares, delusions...the list goes on. And with that, the Marvel universe was really born. Every character had to have emotional layers like that from then on. And the world of Marvel was based on a trauma that Kirby suffered through.

(If you're wondering why I credit Kirby with the cap revival rather than Lee -- I suspect that Martin Goodman suggested the Sub Mariner, the Torch and Cap returns and Lee told Kirby to do it. But as far as specifics, what are the odds that Lee, who served stateside, and who hadn't written a single word about world war two combat until then, would create a Cap without a Bucky, a Cap damaged by wartime experience? Or that Kirby, who had seen horrors of the battlefield, would do so?)

When discussing whether Kirby is worth studying, I'd say that makes him a prime candidate for analysis. And we haven't even gotten to what his art LOOKS like.
JEET HEER:

Glen, you've given us a lot to chew on even before most of us have had a chance to crack open Hatfield. A few quick comments:

1. Hatfield doesn't write about Kirby's collages in any substantial way, although they are alluded to. A significant omission?

2. What Hatfield does do is trace the evolution of Kirby's style from his early attempt to master the illustrational realism of Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff to his subsequent move towards greater abstraction and glyph-like forms. There's an argument to be made that late-period Kirby is closer in spirit to Gary Panter and Lynda Barry than he is to Foster and Raymond -- that is to say he's a cartoonist interested more in abundant, florid mark-making and jungle-thick visual saturation than he is in representational accuracy.

3. Roundtable members might want to check out Hatfield's comparison of Kirby to Futurism and Cubism (pages 45-46): "Though often described as cinematic by admirers, in a sense his style represents a distinctly uncinematic approach to evoking movement in static form, a way that recalls, as I've noted elsewhere, Futurism in its decomposition of movement and Cubism in its all-at-once depiction of different perspectives."

4. All of which suggests that Kirby can be seen as a vernacular modernist, to borrow J. Hoberman's phrase.
JONATHAN LETHEM:
[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?”

I'm also waiting eagerly for the Hatfield to arrive, but here's an off-the-cuff response to a couple of the already remarkable ideas zinging around here. First, while I'm all for the valorization of "cartoonist" (and "comic book" as opposed to "graphic novel") I'm a bit leery of the false choice being proposed here between frame/still/fragment and narrative/movement/storytelling. It feels imported from film studies, where the risk of a visual study of the stylistic meanings of, say, film noir, based too much on stills -- frame enlargements and, even worse, promotional photos of the actors on set taken by set photographers and often lit or posed differently than in the film -- has raised alarms at times... but precisely what defines the very strange difference between comic book and film narrative aesthetics (and in my mind makes comics' adaptation to film such a disaster area) is that comics are a medium of stopped-and-framed narrative moments, of punctuated equilibria, to borrow a term from evolutionary science. And an art equally made, it can't be emphasized enough, of the gaps or silences, abyssal vacancies, between. Film smooths, surrounds, and interpenetrates our sensorium -- comics rupture it and force us to make constant on-the-spot repairs. Kirby was always-already making individual artworks with little frames, even when he draws a page like that kickfight with Batroc. The more so when he draws a cover, obviously -- and the leap to that magnificent Dream Machine painting isn't so distant, I think -- it's full of narrative implication of the kind that Kirby had learned to master, precisely in the way it demands you make little (or, huge) leaps of resolution between the abstraction and the signification. Forget the red herring of "commercial intent" (which plenty of abstract painters had, by the way.) No 20th-century painter would ever have conjured up such a thing. It's a psychedelic-modernist comic book without gutters.

A different thought on the same subject: the fundamental gesture of modernism toward the non-modernist artifacts it encounters -- premodern art of all kinds, commercial culture, new media like film or sound recording etc. -- is to fragment it.

And so, it is precisely by doing this to himself, in that prodigy-turned-consummate professional-turned-outsider artist way Kirby has -- moving through Milton Caniff to Gary Panter on his own imperatives -- that makes him, in this wonderful phrase, a 'vernacular modernist' (and then we're back to borrowing from the vocabulary of film criticism, of course.)
GLEN DAVID GOLD:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. Hatfield doesn't write about Kirby's collages in any substantial way, although they are alluded to. A significant omission?”

As a reader I felt the same way about Kirby's collages as I did the harp solos in Marx Brothers movies -- they were things I didn't like but put up with because they made an artist I revered feel happy, and besides, the good stuff would start again in a moment.

But as an art collector I think they're often quite beautiful. Like Monsignor Lethem, I think the idea of an artist having commercial intent is as relevant to critique as an artist being hirsute or smelling like lilacs when he paints. Nonetheless Kirby was denigrated throughout his career by guys like Will Eisner, who told me face to face that Jack lacked artistic intent, that he only wanted to keep his family fed. So everyone here might all be smarter than that, but the condemnation has been in the air for quite a while. I suppose the collages make the argument more complex, in that they never really worked in print, they were hard to do, they had to be sent to a different printer to be incorporated into the comics, and the complexities of creating and printing them couldn't be evidence that Kirby was just trying to keep his family fed. They're WEIRD, which strikes me as being the first place to look for artistic intent -- weirdness.

[Jonathan Lethem wrote:] “I'm a bit leery of the false choice being proposed here between frame/still/fragment and narrative/movement/storytelling.”

Damn. I forgot we could argue with the precepts of this whole thing. Me too! What he said.

[Responding to a comment from Lethem on PTSD:] Where it gets really dire (for me at least) is Silver Star. Kirby's last personal creation is a revamp of Captain America in which a super soldier is born in a moment of combat stress. His superpower is disassociation, the hallmark mental PTSD state. His enemy, Darius Drumm, is vague and shape shifting, with uncertain powers. By the final issue, Drumm is the angel of Death, and Silver Star is turned to a desiccated husk. It makes little narrative sense unless you read it as a man wrestling with communicating the sense of dis-ease that was overwhelming his ability to see straight.
DAN NADEL:

I'm wading into the Hatfield book but am currently bogged down by his discussion of Charles Pierce.

Anyway, as to the collages... I don't think Hatfield can be faulted for giving them scant notice since his primary focus is on Kirby the storyteller and these collages wonderfully do not tell a story in the a-b-c way the rest of his narratives function. I love these collages. A lot. A few notes: Kirby was known as an inveterate consumer of magazines -- Look, Life, and tons of science mags. I always imagine these collages arising from perhaps a chance encounter with, say, Rauschenberg, in an issue of Look or some other general interest mag and it making a passing impression that melded with his love of science mags. This is an oversimplification, but it accounts for the sheer abstraction of things combined with their "science" edge. Here's wonderful collage on top of art by Pollock, Dubuffet, Picasso and others, I think. Richard Prince eat your heart out.

More than anything else it reminds me of Oyvind Fahlstrom or about a dozen mid-career artists in NYC right now. Glen is correct that Kirby did these "for fun" and then inserted them when needed. That need, I would speculate, might've arisen from wanting to articulate the awe he must've often felt. That thing that can't be articulated that, to my mind, he gets closest to in narrative terms in projects like Silver Star, where he's grasping at ways of speaking, ways of feeling.

I like Jonathan's use of the term vernacular modernism to describe Kirby's standalone visuals. They occupy a place not unlike, say, Sister Corita (wait, stay with me) in that it's art created for mass production without a gallery/museum in mind. But it's as "pure" as anything else. As to Kirby and the "I just needed to make sales" thing. I love that that was the way he deflected questions of motivation. I'm sure he meant it, and it was very real -- I mean, he really DID need to make sales -- but, that drive to do so came from somewhere (i.e. his childhood, etc.) and the fervency with which he went about doing so goes far beyond anything necessitated by money. In other words, Don Heck needed to make sales, too. So did Eisner (thus his work for the army). More interestingly, I think that "need" allowed him cover to work through his fantasies. It was the trick he used to fire himself forward. We all need those little tricks internally and externally. That may have been his.

Anyway, all of this is to get around to saying in response to Jeet's first question: Yes, there is a major case to be made for looking at Kirby's art apart from its narrative. Individual panels, whole pages, covers -- these are all art objects that need examining -- both as raw Kirby (e.g. pencils, in which you can see and begin to understand his gesture) and as collaborative works (e.g. all his many inkers). The pencils, in particular, give it away -- those drawings (because they're more "drawings" than comics at that stage are so passionate and so heavily rendered/worked-on that they didn't need inking, really. Kirby completed the art. And he didn't need to. That's what really gets me -- he could have roughed-in more areas, left out backgrounds more often, etc. But he drew the picture he needed to get down on paper -- not just the schematic an inker might need to embellish. Those pencils give the lie to Kirby's own dismissal of his work.

JEET HEER:

Kirby Round-tablers:

Jonathan and Glen have raised a host of interesting points, so I'll add a few comments to push us along.

1. The characterization of Kirby's "optimism" was from Spiegelman and does seem like a misreading, particularly if we're mindful of the pessimistic work Kirby did in the 1970s and 1980s. I'm wondering though if there wasn't some optimism or ebullience in the 1960s Marvel work (perhaps because of the writerly balance provided by Lee?). Those 1960s comics do, at least superficially, seem to be brimming over with a gleeful delight in world-building.

2. Hatfield eschews a biographical approach to Kirby in favor of formalism but Glen and Joanthan are right of course that a psychobiographical approach to Kirby could be potentially very rewarding. Ideally we'd have a full-dress biography of Kirby along the lines of Ellmann on Joyce or Michaelis on Schulz. The experience of the war is, of course, central but I think it also has to be seen as reinforcing the lessons of the Kirby's childhood in the tenements of the lower east side.

3. Furthering the biographical interpretations and the importance of war, there is one particular experience that might have been formative. As a solider during the war, Kirby helped liberate a concentration camp, so he would have been one of the first (and few) Americans who had some eye-witness experience of the Holocaust (I was told this by Dan Nadel and am curious if he has any more information about it). I'm struck by how frequently Kirby allergorizes the Holocaust in his work from the mid-1960s on (which the late, great historian Peter Novick argued was the period that the Shoah started being seriously addressed in America). Of course, Kirby being Kirby he did so in pulp science fiction terms of space monsters that threaten to destroy humanity (from Galactus onwards). To pick one example of many, Machine Man: The Fight Robot #3 (June 1978) is a fairly typical late-period Kirby: a badly printed 35 cent comic about a robot with an identity crisis. But the villain is Ten-For, the Mean Machine, described as "a Holocaust specialist." As Machine Man says at the end of the comic, "Didn't you hear that space-devil?! He said he was a Holocaust-specialist! This entire planet may be in danger!" This brings us, interestingly enough, back to Spiegelman since one could easily argue that it's a strike against Kirby that his response to the Holocaust was to recast it as a space opera. In a sense, Kirby and Spiegelman represent two opposite reactions to the Holocaust: Spiegelman's instinct is to make make the Holocaust something that can be plausibly narrated by scaling it down into an animal fable (i.e. going down from a human level to the level of mice and cats) whereas Kirby achieved the difficult feat of making the Nazis even more grandiose and over-the-top than they were in real life (i.e. the Red Skull, Hydra and all the other totalitarian bullies Kirby created). But that's what Kirby did: take all the bits and pieces of the world around him -- historical events, personal experiences as well as the visual environment -- and translate it into comic book terms.

4. I once wrote a slightly overheated paragraph about Kirby's relationship with big-H History which might be pertinent here: "Jack Kirby was the immigrant crowded into the tenements of New York ('Street Code'). He was the tough ghetto kid whose street-fighting days prepared him to be a warrior (the Boy Commandos). He was the patriotic fervour that won the war against Nazism (Captain America). He was the returning veteran who sought peace in the comforts of domestic life (Young Romance). He was the more than slightly demented panic about internal communist subversion (Fighting American). He was the Space Race and the promise of science (Sky Masters, Reed Richards). He was the smart housewife trapped in the feminine mystique, forced to take a subservient gender role (the Invisible Girl). He was the fear of radiation and fallout (the Incredible Hulk). He was the civil rights movement and the liberation of the Third World (the Black Panther). He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey). He was the old soldier grown weary from a lifetime of struggle (Captain Victory). There was hardly any significant development in American 20th century history that didn’t somehow get refracted through Kirby’s whacko sensibility. Jack Kirby was the 20th century."
GLEN DAVID GOLD:

About the concentration camp -- In the Jack Kirby Collector #27, they reprint an interview with Ray Wyman where Jack says the following (transcription errors are my own):

[Jack Kirby quote:] Once I had an old guy with a little gray beard run over to me. I can hear his thin little voice as he looked into my eyes. Tears were running down his cheek. He couldn't believe his eyes. He blinked a couple of times and he said, "You're Jewish." I said, "Yeah, I'm Jewish." So he said, "Come with me." So I ran after this little old guy with the rest of my squad behind me. It's a long road; I remember some farm buildings and a factory. It could have been an ambush but we figured that it probably wasn't. I mean, what would the Germans be doing with this little gray beard? Then we came to this walled-in place, this stockade, and he pointed; "There, there," he said. I stopped. German guards were leaving by the dozens...They knew that I am a Scout. They knew that this big division was right behind me. I was standing there looking at them as they yelled out "fuck you" in English...I thought I was going to see prisoners of war, you know, some of our guys that got caught in some of the early fighting, but what I saw would pin you to the spot like it did me. Most of these people were Polish; Polish Jews who were working in some of the nearby factories. I don't remember if the place really had a name, it was a smaller camp, not like Auschwitz, but it was horrible just the same. Just horrible. There were mostly woman and some men; they looked like they hadn't eaten for I don't know how long. They were scrawny. Their clothes were all tattered and dirty. The Germans didn't give a shit for anything. They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, "What do I do?" Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. All I could say was, 'Oh, God."

In many ways I think that war was the last human war. We were just a bunch of guys with guns. The danger was always very real -- there wasn't an unknown enemy figure coming up against you, you could see their faces and you fought them at very close quarters.

I've been compiling Kirby quotes about WWII from every interview I can find. My idea has been to do exactly what you're talking about, a way to accommodate Kirby's personal experience when discussing his artwork. I started out thinking about violence but one of the first quotations I saw stopped me dead long before I got to "violence."

[Jack Kirby quote:] There was one shell that had hit, and I saw these Germans laying in a perfect circle except the bottom half of their bodies were missing, see? The shell evidently hit right in the middle of this group. You see a lot of these nice designs if you're an artist.

DOUG HARVEY:

Glen's "only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis" riposte to Spiegelman's Kirby-bashing is LOL brilliant, and the "You see a lot of these nice designs if you're an artist" quote is one of the best "artist statements" - by any artist, ever - but Kirby was a way better collagist than Harpo a harpist.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

This research of yours, Glen, suggests a fascinating and horrible inquiry that could explode the bounds of our round-table on the book completely. I've been fascinated for a long time by the subject of the change in the work of those who really did go and serve in the European hell --apart from macho war novelists like James Jones or filmmakers like Sam Fuller, who made it central to their career, it was a rare case (i.e., Kurt Vonnegut), who later chose to dwell on the subject directly (if they were willing to mention it at all). But the saturation of those facts through the art is a profound thing. Case in point, Jimmy Stewart, who returned from his very distinguished and extensive career as a commander on bombing runs (there's some reason to believe he may even have been over Dresden -- certainly he helped destroy any number of cities) refusing to talk about it, but who then plunged into a series of Hitchcock films and Anthony Mann films (and a couple of others by Ford and Preminger) that excavated the dark, cynical, even nihilistic depths of his previously sunny, resilient star image.

This in particular is just beyond nearly anything I've ever heard from a veteran. Incredible --

[Jack Kirby quote:] There was one shell that had hit, and I saw these Germans laying in a perfect circle except the bottom half of their bodies were missing, see? The shell evidently hit right in the middle of this group. You see a lot of these nice designs if you're an artist.

DAN NADEL:

Kirby seems to have only once discussed the war with this kind of depth. He tells stories in other interviews, but not like this.

Anyway, two striking things about the below:

1) We never find out what happened after Kirby said "Oh, God". What he did next would, I imagine, determine a lot about what he felt in the future.

2) The "design" bit is completely amazing, and jibes with "I had to make sales" matter-of-fact attitude. Something about that way Kirby dealt with things at the surface level.

And, to respond to one of Jeet's questions:

[Jeet Heer quote:] 1. The characterization of Kirby's "optimism" was from Spiegelman and does seem like a misreading, particularly if we're mindful of the pessimistic work Kirby did in the 1970s and 1980s. I'm wondering though if there wasn't some optimism or ebullience in the 1960s Marvel work (perhaps because of the writerly balance provided by Lee?). Those 1960s comics do, at least superficially, seem to be brimming over with a gleeful delight in world-building.

The optimism reading is a fair one. Glen brings up a good point, re: the mournful vibe around Captain America, but otherwise those comics are peppy, crisp, and verbally ecstatic. A lot of that is Lee, but Kirby, particularly in FF, and perhaps owing to Sinnott's inking, was creating a gleaming and soft future vision. The hard edges of his work were dulled a bit (this opens up a whole discussion about what inking does to meaning) and he probably WAS a bit happier. He was on top again and creating for an audience of kids. So, there is a sunniness there. But lurking behind it is... everything else. Thor is VERY dark and sad, for example. So I think with a small amount of effort anyone can get past the optimism. There's a great case to be made (and Hatfield sort of does it by asking us to think about narrative drawing) for reading Lee/Kirby as drawings, not as dialogue & story. If you just read the drawings it's a very different experience. It's not fair, of course, but so what.

THREE: KIRBY’S MASKS AND RAGGED SURFACE

SARAH BOXER:

I can't bear Kirby's overheated, crowded pages, so I end up focusing on his surfaces. First thoughts about Captain America: I prefer a super-smooth superhero. What are those fish scales doing on Cap's back? Are they chain-mail? Hair? Rippling muscles? (My son says definitely chain-mail.) I looked it up on the web and was charmed by the answers offered:

"so he can wield his mighty shield," which made no sense to me (my son says it does make sense because the chain-mail allows him to grip the shield in case he loses a hand) and "good on thermodynamics," which also made no sense.

I conclude that the fish scales are a triple-thick layer of protection - chain-mail, hair and rippling muscles - all in one. And now that you ask me to be Freudian, I see a triple-thick psychological defense. The marks of Captain America are all defensive - the shield, the Hermes-type helmet, and the scales. I asked my son what Cap's superpowers are, and he said he doesn't really have any. He just has ordinary weapons but he's still awesome. (Is that true? I mean the part about no superpowers?) And what about that white A? Is that the symbol of Cap's inner shame?

Another thought: Glen mentioned the Silver Star and his bizarre superpower - dissociation. What does this mean? How does he use it? In any case it does seem related to ptsd. When your psychological defenses fail you - when your chain-mail skin fails you - you get dissociation, ptsd. (Or perhaps dissociation actually is another layer of defense.) All this also makes me wonder about the Silver Surfer, whose layers fall away to reveal a super smooth superhero, totally frictionless, totally undefended.

As to Kirby & modernism, I don't see it. It's pure narrative fantasy with every inch crammed with meaning & emotion. That ain't modern. It's horror vacui. Which is also a defense. Against vacuums.

Welcome Sarah -- I have to say, I'm delighted by the level of conservation and debate we've managed to achieve even before Hatfield's book has arrived. I love the comment about Captain America's "fish scales."

About Captain America's powers, I have to confess I didn't know the answer to this one. I knew he was a "super soldier" thanks to a serum but what does that mean? Here's what I found on the web (and Captain America experts can correct if it's wrong):

"Captain America has superhuman powers that include increased agility, strength, speed, endurance, and reaction time superior to any Olympic athlete who ever competed. The Super-Soldier formula that he has metabolized has enhanced all of his bodily functions to the peak of human efficiency. Notably, his body eliminates the excessive build-up of fatigue-producing poisons in his muscles, granting him phenomenal endurance. He also has the ability to heal very quickly."
GLEN DAVID GOLD:

I love your kid. Tousle his hair for me, if he's up for that sort of thing. If he's anything like a Kirby kid, he'll say, "Aw, g'wan Ma."

[Sarah Boxer wrote:] “And what about that white A? Is that a symbol of Cap's inner shame?”

Yes. Yes it is. I'm glad we're all on the same boat here.

[Sarah Boxer quote:] “Another thought: Dan mentioned the Silver Star and his bizarre superpower - dissociation. What does this mean? How does he use it?”

The first ten pages of Silver Star are among the most bizarre Kirby ever drew. You'll get some scans to confirm I'm not lying here, but: it begins with a little girl playing guitar in some ethereal place, trying to "reach out" to a soldier -- Morgan Miller -- so she can sing him a birthday song. We intercut between her and the battlefield, with her lyrics as narration. Morgan is fired upon, his buddies are blown up, he starts to fade into "Kirby Krackle" (Scan #1) and then he picks up a tank and throws it. Back on the little girl as she walks away dejected. "I thought you'd project to me if I wrote this song...There's no light here. It's very dark...and I know that you could change this into a fun place."

We cut to a battlefield hospital, where Silver Star "ACTS like a weirdo," meaning the doctors are arguing whether his complete unresponsiveness means he's gone into a coma.

No, he hasn't. He's projected himself out of his body and into...well, Scan #2 & #3...a place just called Elsewhere. Into which the villain, for no easily explained reason, also projects. While (remember) Silver Star is still non-responsive in a field hospital.

And the little girl? We find out later: trauma victim. After her family farm blew up, she's a child "frozen in time and space for ten years! -- A child -- Alive in stasis!"

[Sarah Boxer wrote:] “As to Kirby & modernism, I don't see it. It's pure narrative fantasy with every inch crammed with meaning & emotion. That ain't modern. It's horror vacui. Which is also a defense. Against vacuums.”

Yay! I only know modernism as a literary term so I defer to you.
JONATHAN LETHEM:

Very quickly on a busy morning (and stalling until that book arrives) --

Those Silver Star pages are insane. Who knew Kirby was the secret auteur of "What Dreams May Come?"

In Shame,

JL

For the second installment of this roundtable, go here, and for the third installment, go here.

38 Responses to Jack Kirby: Hand of Fire Roundtable (Part 1)

Jeet, You are asking people to discuss a book they haven’t read? Shouldn’t you have put off discussion until the people involved had read the book?
That said this piece is very interesting because I’d rather see Gold, Lethem, Dan.. discuss Kirby than the book .

The roundtable was framed as a discussion of both Kirby and of Hatfield’s book. The participants — particularly Glen — were eager to discuss Kirby even before they read the book, so there is a long early section of general thoughts on Kirby. But later we get in Hatfield but also many other Kirby related issues.

James: the participants aren’t “writing about a book they haven’t read”; they are writing about Kirby, a cartoonist whose work and career they are very familiar with. As you’ll see in the second and third installments, the participants will have lots to say about Hatfield’s book while also continuing to talk about Kirby’s career.

Any reason for Glen, Dan, and Jonathan, to discuss Kirby is a good one. The discussion has been excellent so far, and I was particularly interested in Dan’s and Glen’s comments on Silver Star which is one of the very best stories Kirby ever created in my opinion. If some movie studio wanted to make a really good science fiction movie Silver Star would be the template.
BTW I’ve got a whole bunch of Kirby quotes Glen may be interested in which I can post here, or forward to Glen.

Here’s the thing, though: If you’re going to promote the piece as being a round-table discussion of Hand of Fire, do you think it’s unreasonable to expect the piece to, y’know, actually be aboutHand of Fire — that is, to actually address Hatfield’s arguments and conclusions — rather than simply a discussion of Kirby’s work in itself?

It’s not a piddling distinction. If I were to write a review of (say) R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis without actually reading Crumb’s book — because after all, I know a fuck-ton about the Bible, and I could easily knock out 600 words on Biblical scholarship and exegeses — you might fairly accuse me of missing the point.

That’s what’s going on here. And it not only reeks of bait-and-switch, it implicitly devalues the work that Professor Hatfield has done: Screw that guy: We can talk about Kirby all day without even reading his book!

I’m sure this will get better as it goes along: but the decision to start this way seems to me unwise.

All in all, thought provoking commentary. Enjoyed the analysis of Silver Star, which did seem to be a pessimistic, violent take on things examined earlier in titles like the X-Men and Captain America, without much of the underlying optimism. So an examination of Kirby’s late life mental state might be in order.

“The pencils, in particular, give it away — those drawings (because they’re more “drawings” than comics at that stage are so passionate and so heavily rendered/worked-on that they didn’t need inking, really. Kirby completed the art. And he didn’t need to. That’s what really gets me — he could have roughed-in more areas, left out backgrounds more often, etc. But he drew the picture he needed to get down on paper — not just the schematic an inker might need to embellish. Those pencils give the lie to Kirby’s own dismissal of his work.”

This is a really important point and related to the original art ownership question as well. Prior to around 1965 Kirby was not producing fully rendered pencils. From the late ’30s to 1958 Kirby produced pencils which did not include fully articulated light and shade. Up until 1958 that was because Kirby often inked his own work, or had the opportunity to approve it or touch it up with a brush. At Marvel 1958-1963 Kirby was under a tremendous workload based in part on the horrible page rate he was being paid. As a result the pencils were often not as finished as his prior work, but for whatever reason (possibly because he had lost control of the final look) Kirby on occasion began to develop the highly articulated pencil finish which came to the fore after Kirby’s page rate increased to the extent he was able to go from writing and penciling as many as a hundred (or more) pages a month, to a workload of around 60 pages a month. The quality of Kirby’s writing took a quantum leap at the same time. Kirby went from grinding out recycled plots based on work he’d done previously, or based on old science fiction chestnuts from his youth, to having the time to really contemplate his stories. His pencils became so finely chiseled, and complete in every detail they left rightly should have nothing to the imagination of the inker. Kirby referred to the inkers as “service people” whose job was to make his pencils ready for reproduction. Kirby never complained about the inkers, even a thinly veiled reference to Vince Colletta mentioned only that “some inkers are better suited to other material.” At the same time I think the degree of finish in the pencils is a clear attempt on Kirby’s part to preserve his vision. This is reinforced by Kirby reinking several heads which had been altered by Mike Royer in issue #5 of Mister Miracle. If Kirby drove that lesson home to Mike Royer who was in general very faithful to the pencils, one can only imagine what Kirby really thought of inking which obscured his personal line style.
The real gnawing issue for Kirby though wasn’t inking, it was what Lee did to his stories and characters after Kirby turned over his story to Lee. It was painful for Kirby to month after month hand Lee GOJIRA and see it turned in to GODZILLA. Kirby commented to Tim Skelly:

“..at Marvel I couldn’t say anything, because it would be taken away from me and put in another context, and it would be lost. All my connection to it would be severed. I created Galactus, the Silver Surfer, and an army of characters, and my connection with them is lost. You get to feel like a ghost. You’re writing commercials for somebody and…It’s a strange feeling, but I experienced it, and I didn’t like it much.

Skelly: Things are bad for you in the comics field as far as recognition goes?

Kirby: It wasn’t recognition so much—you just couldn’t take a character anywhere. You could devote time to a character, put a lot of thought into it, help it evolve, and then lose all connection.

This is the worst sort of internet complaining. The piece isn’t being “promoted” and we’re not trying to “bait and switch” anything. What could possible be gained? In essays, roundtables, etc., the world over one often begins with a broad discussion of the subject at hand (in this case, Jack Kirby) and then moves into the specific thing that occasioned the discussion (in this case, Hand of Fire). It certainly doesn’t cast any kind of value judgment over Hatfield’s book. Good lord, we’re devoting a week to it! I’m glad we began this way because it established some ideas that we could then use as common ground to build a larger discussion. And, y’know, it’s a three part piece — there’s more. Relax, people.

Huh. I must have imagined the header on the TCJ.com homepage, and the blurb promising “A roundtable on the occasion of Charles Hatfield’s book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby,” then.

What could possible [sic] be gained?

Page views for a generic discussion of Kirby that you could have had at any time, on the coattails of a book that’s garnered positive critical buzz? Sounds possible to me.

You’re being disingenuous.

I am in partial agreement with you on this…

I’m glad we began this way because it established some ideas that we could then use as common ground to build a larger discussion.

…were it not for the fact that a lot of the ideas raised in this opening section will ultimately be irrelevant to any discussion of Hand of Fire. It’s all very fascinating about Kirby’s use of collage and all, but Hatfield mentions it only glancingly in his text. Instead, he singles out Fantastic Four, Thor, and especially the Fourth World books and The Eternals, for close reading, focusing pretty tightly on Kirby as writer and ideas man, rather than as a purely graphic force, going deeply into his preoccupations with the totalitarian mindset, the technological sublime, and man’s search for meaning.

Kirby is a big subject, and Hatfield, by necessity, only writes about a few key aspects of his work. Which means that a lot of the ideas established in this introductory section will prove to be dead ends and blind alleys — because you’re all discussing your favorite things about Kirby’s work, rather than the aspects that Hatfield has singled out for study. Which tells us nothing about Hatfield, and a lot about your panelists.

Which is fine, in a sense — the panelists are all accomplished and fascinating people — but again, it does a disservice to Hatfield. And it is, ostensibly, Hatfield’s work that is under discussion here, and not Kirby’s per se, no?

Dammit! Charles gave me a ride to the CAPS meeting in LA a couple of weeks ago where he was on a panel about Will Eisner, and he showed me a copy of his book (which I didn’t even know existed) and said he had an extra copy he could sign and sell me after the meeting was over. However, I had to leave the CAPS meeting early at the panel break and though I thanked him for the ride and said goodbye, I never closed the deal. But after reading this round table, I’ve just gotta close the deal now, or I’ll go crazy! He’s one smart, erudite fellow, he is!

@Jack Feerick. “And it is, ostensibly, Hatfield’s work that is under discussion here, and not Kirby’s per se, no?” The assumption you are making here is incorrect. When I moderated the discussion and edited it, my goal was to have both a general discussion of Kirby and also a particular discussion of Hatfield’s book. This is explicit in my opening remarks: “The questions below are designed to pick up some of the central ideas of Hatfield’s book with an eye towards measuring the scope of Kirby’s achievement.” So you should expect a discussion that takes up Hatfield and also discusses aspects of Kirby not covered in depth in Hatfield (which discussion itself is relevant because one way to judge an monograph is to look at what it focuses on and what it ignores. Hatfield had every right to define his parameters as he wanted but people discussing Kirby also have a right to frame the artist’s career differently and take a different perspective. Or to put it another way, what Hatfield excludes sheds light on the salience of what he discusses).
All the panelists have a history of strong writing on comics, so I thought that their views on Kirby in general were of interest as well as their take on Hatfield’s book. And Kirby is a very big topic calling for a full spectrum of critical responses and approaches. So this will be a very wide-ranging discussion. If you want something more narrowly focused, I apologize and advise you to look elsewhere.

Charles Hatfield is a contributor to this site, and the last thing we intend is disrespect to him or his writing. I think you will see that his book comes in for quite a bit of discussion in future installments.

Jeet, I would just suggest amending in brief your introduction to note the first segment here is more of a bonus feature acting as a preface to the discussion of Charles’ book. When you first wade into it the first three people to comment have not read the book (Dan has read a bit), and without knowing what I know by way of your subsequent comments it looked really weird seeing people supposed to be talking about the book, saying they haven’t read it. Of course now I know the round table took placed over a long period of time (would it be wise to date the various comments?), and that as things move along everyone will have read the book (I assume). As it stands every person who begins reading the piece might well have the same confused reaction I had.

The idea that Art S. has misread Kirby is an overstatement, as I doubt that Art actually read any Kirby past the i960s Lee/Marvel coproductions (other than “Street Code”, which he did speak of as if he read it). Similarly, when I asked Art a few years ago he hadn’t even read some of the best Dan Clowes work like Ice Haven.

As a person who has read a lot of stories by Kirby, and read a lot of interviews I can’t agree with the argument Charles makes that Kirby’s storytelling was graphically driven. On the other hand despite having read the chapter twice I’m still not sure I’m reading Charles correctly. Part of this is I’m suspicious of anything which seems to try and describe Kirby as primarily an artist as opposed to a writer/artist. My understanding of Kirby’s methods is that he had the characters and plots very much in hand before doing any drawing. In fact
Charles even recounts a typical story describing this process in his book. There are many similar stories of Kirby lost in thought, and then describing characters, setting, and plot in great detail before ever doing any drawing. Kirby was also well known as a oral storyteller. Many of the stories in his war comic book The Losers are based directly on stories Kirby had been telling for years. Kirby described his creative process to Mark Herbert in 1969.

“I’m usually in a room about this size, but I feel I see a lot because I analyze a lot. I see the same things you do, but maybe I get more time to analyze it. So you sit and you think, and it’s as simple as that. If you sit and you think for twenty years you can come up with quite a lot.”

There is also the fact that Kirby’s text, just his way with words is far more polished than the vast majority of comic book writing (that’s not saying much). And the graphic artistic impulse represented by Kirby’s private paintings, drawings, and collage work, has a written word counterpart. Beginning in 1969 Kirby wrote four drafts of a novel called THE HORDE.
If you look at the standard photographs of Kirby and Joe Simon in Kirby’s attic studio (Kirby was later relegated to the basement after the birth of his daughter Lisa) you will see a massive Underwood typewriter sitting right next to Kirby’s drawing board. Later in the ’70s Kirby typed a full script for the Silver Surfer graphic novel. A page of Kirby’s typed script was published in TJKC and Mark Evanier has a copy of the script.
Of course it was unusual for Kirby to work from a script as he drew, and since the story was in Kirby’s head he obviously framed and edited the story as he drew. Kirby’s writing was not a kind of “automatic writing”
it wasn’t a stream of consciousness process, it was a contemplative process. There may be exceptions to that, as with his early work at Marvel 1958-63 where the speed of production demanded Kirby work in great haste. Kirby’s best work though (1951-54) (1970-1986) came about as a result of “sitting and thinking.”

@Patrick Ford. I’ll have to be a bit brief and abrupt because I’m working on another article right now, but I think you are are misreading Hatfield — or at the very least reading Hatfield very differently than I read him. I don’t think Hatfield is saying that Kirby was an artist rather than a writer. Rather, Hatfield is saying that Kirby’s writing and drawing are inseparable. Kirby wrote through his drawings and his drawings rarely existed without a narrative purpose. As Yeats said, you can’t separate the dancer from the dance. With Kirby you can’t separate the narrative content from the visual forms that Kirby embodied them in. Whether he wrote up a script ahead of time or not, a Kirby comic exists when it is drawn. (The novel he wrote, of course, is another matter — but it’s not comics, whatever light it might shed on Kirby’s writing process or narrative skills in another form). That’s why it makes sense to speak of Kirby as — at the very least — the co-writer of the 1960s Marvel work and not just the artist. He didn’t illustrate ideas — in the manner, say of Classics Illustrated or a 19th century illustration to a novel. Rather, he embodied narrative in drawing.

Again, briefly. To put it another way, it’s a mistake to ask “Was Kirby a writer who drew or an artist who wrote?” Kirby transcended the categories of writer and artist because he wrote and drew together simultaneously. He was neither a writer nor an artist — he was a cartoonist.

You are probably correct. It’s the phrase “wrote through his drawing” which I don’t agree with. The drawing came after the story was written, even though it was almost always in Kirby’s head, or in notes. As far as executing the story on the artboard, well it’s known the images came first. I agree though that in the best cartooning the writing and art work as a unit.
The subject of drawing as narrative is complex. Most illustration, and most paintings are narrative. The argument could even be made that an illustration of a soup can for a newspaper ad is narrative. That even a landscape or portrait is narrative. The Mona Lisa is a good example of implied narrative in a portrait.
I wouldn’t really get into all that. It is however a solid argument to say many illustrations and paintings are narrative. In Fine art an obvious example would be Bruegel or something like Vermeer’s THE LOVE LETTER. In the area of magazine illustration Norman Rockwell described himself as a storyteller.
I also don’t quit understand the use of words like “frothy” when describing Kirby’s word choices. In one way the description is perfectly appropriate, except that the writing is taking place in a super hero comic book context where all writing could be described as frothy. So the writing is frothy and exuberant compared to what? Other super hero comic book writing? Again though I may be misreading this. A really good beer might be described as frothy and exuberant. It certainly sounds better than “flat and boring.”
I sense (probably my imagination) a restraint on the part of Charles, almost like he has peppered his text with qualifiers out of a concern he might be laughed at for taking the subject matter seriously.
Frank and Dan recently wrote a really strong endorsement of Jaime’s LOVE BUNGLERS story. I assume they wrote with full cognizance their strong endorsement would leave them open to mocking barbs gleefully calling them out as goofy fans so entrenched in a personal nostalgia trip they had lost the handle on their critical faculties. So they said what they had to say anyhow, because they meant it.

Thanks for the great warm-up. It’s good to see mention of Silver Star, not found in the book. Charles is careful to distance himself from the “devotees” who are interested in what he calls the sixth period of Kirby’s work, but I hope it’s not too late for him to give it another try. Like Pat I noticed a hesitation, a deference, in the book that I hope to see addressed, along with Jeet’s collaborator/auteur split.

This is immense. Thanks so much for this. I’d never seen that Kirby Collage before, nor The Dream Machine. so thanks for introducing those. Just as an outsider, I’m interested in the conversations regarding the impact of war on Kirby and also Spiegelman’s dismissal of Kirby as optimistic. And I’d argue that Kirby saw himself as a Modernist, he was taking all these myths, stories, legends and religions and updating them, making them relevant for a modern audience. Does it go without saying that he rejected realism?

While I loved the comment about Kirby being “the only major cartoonist to have actually killed Nazis”- I knew I was a goner going in to this piece. As always, it’s writers wanting to write and wax poetic and offer philosophy for things that were designed for pure escapism. While it’s true that Kirby had great intensity and passion that you can sometimes read within his art- that doesn’t mean that you *should*. “Is the A a symbol of his inner shame”- are you guys kidding me. You’re the sorts who carried around Nietzsche in high school just to be seen with it, or else you’ve got far too much time on your hands to go on at such lengths about Captain America. It’s also worth noting that Captain America’s design and shield were designed by Joe Simon, who explained he was greatly influenced as a child by a badge-shaped shield he had seen in a shop. But no, no, we mustn’t discuss that… please go into the greater underlying psychological foundations of what Captain America throwing his shield at Kang must REALLY represent, as it couldn’t be to have thrilled kids and comic buyers at the time it was printed, and keep treating beautiful cheap thrills and pulp adventure as VERY serious high art. In this sense, tcj readers and writers are not so dissimilar from superhero crazy man-children; you both show a collective chip on your shoulder for elusive mainstream acceptance of comic books as “not just for kids”.

…If you’re going to promote the piece as being a round-table discussion of Hand of Fire…

[Dan Nadel]: “The piece isn’t being “promoted” [as that]

Huh. I must have imagined the header on the TCJ.com homepage, and the blurb promising “A roundtable on the occasion of Charles Hatfield’s book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby,” then.
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Damn, even relatively literate people are “comprehension-challenged” these days!